07 June 2008 9:26 PM

Like a gold coin on a dunghill, the truth about the EU

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Amid the silly soap opera that now passes for British politics, in which we are supposed to care more about hairstyles and mannerisms than about the country, there was one moment last week when a decent man said something important.

The brief flash of truth shone out like a gold coin on a dunghill.

The man was Peter Lilley, older and wiser than when he used to sing daft songs to Tory conferences. Mr Lilley looks to me as if, like several others, he is trapped in the Unconservative Party and would blossom like an irrigated desert if only he could escape from it.

Because what he said was important, there have been far too few reports of it. Hansard for Tuesday, June 3, at 3.35pm, will give you the details, if you want them.

But his clear, hard message was that 80 per cent of our laws are now made in Brussels, and Parliament has no power to reject or amend them.

If you wonder why our Post Offices are all closing, it’s thanks to an EU directive. So is the increasingly hated Data Protection Act. So are Home Improvement Packs and fortnightly bin collections.

In 15 years’ time our Parliament will have only two functions left – to raise taxes and declare war – admittedly things that our current politicians are rather keen on.

Mr Lilley’s mischievous suggestion is that MPs’ pay should be cut each time they hand over authority to others. Incredibly, many MPs don’t know what is going on. If they ended up on the wages paid to district councillors – which is all they really are now – they might care more.

His own stark words cannot be improved upon: ‘Few voters, or even members of this house, fully realise how many powers have been, or are about to be, transferred elsewhere. There are three reasons for this.

'The first is that governments of all persuasions deny that any significant powers are being transferred. The second is that, once powers have been transferred, Ministers engage in a charade of pretence that they still retain those powers. Even when introducing measures that they are obliged to bring in as a result of an EU directive they behave as though the initiative were their own.

‘Indeed, Ministers often end up nobly accepting responsibility for laws that they actually opposed when they were being negotiated in Brussels.’

So now you know. Not since Dunkirk, 68 years ago, has our national independence been so imperilled. But back then, we could see the danger. Now most of us pretend it isn’t there.

Why must we pay for £18m Ross to insult our values?

Defiantly refusing to get the point, the BBC continues to claim that it is right to pay £18million to the superslob Jonathan Ross.

There’s more to this than just bad taste. It is a cultural cringe, the worship of loutism and a deliberate grinding of the faces of the morally and culturally conservative people of this country.

This force is so strong that David Cameron (as is now largely forgotten) submitted without protest while Ross subjected him to lewd questioning, asking him if he had masturbated over pictures of Margaret Thatcher.

Ross talks on TV in an arrogant sort of loutspeak.

I wonder if he talks like that when he’s dealing with his lawyers and his accountants. His every attitude and gesture implies contempt for what he no doubt regards as ‘stuffy’ and ‘conventional’ attitudes – that is to say the invisible web of moral goodness that used to keep us safe, but which very rich people (like him) don’t need because they can shield themselves from real life.

Who decides that such a person should be given a major slot on primetime TV? What can those of us who dislike it do? Nothing. Your money – extracted from you under threat of imprisonment – will be handed to Mr Ross whatever you think.

I am the last conservative I know who supports the BBC licence fee, but – following this Marie Antoinette piece of arrogance in which we are told we must pay to be insulted – the Corporation has probably ensured that its days are numbered.

If it thinks Mr Ross is so marvellous, why not hold a flag day for him and see how much of the £18million it manages to raise?

Good enough for you, but not for Benn

The great infuriating unpunished scandal of socialist school hypocrisy never ceases. They take for themselves what they deny to others, just like the old Kremlin Politburo. And they have no shame about it.

The late Caroline Benn, wife of Tony, was the most fervent campaigner for comprehensive schools in Britain.

Mr Benn – consistent with his principles – withdrew his two sons from their private school to send them to a comprehensive. One of those sons, Stephen, then tried to become a Labour councillor and worked for the fanatically egalitarian Inner London Education Authority.

He married Nita Clarke, another career Leftist (one-time Press officer for Glenys Kinnock, later a Blair adviser at Downing Street). Now we find that their 18-year-old daughter, Emily, has been attending... selective grammar schools. These are the schools her family opposed for decades. Labour still hates them so much that its last Education Act (backed by the Useless Tories) banned the creation of any more.

Apparently unbothered by this ridiculous contrast between her private advantage and her public views, Emily Benn is now trying to become a Labour MP.

‘I care more about the people that aren’t in grammar schools,’ she trills. I bet she does.

Reality that's beyond belief

Some time ago I tried to write a satire, imagining what Britain would be like after ten years of New Labour rule.

My imagination wasn’t up to it. I predicted cannabis on open sale, and licensed shops for stolen goods, which has more or less come true.

But I would never have dared suggest that parking wardens would be paid more than front-line soldiers, or that thousands of prisoners would turn down early release because it was too nice inside.

Is the problem that we are now so outrageously misruled that we are unable to believe it, and so can’t bring ourselves to do anything?

* Once upon a time Government Ministers would never dream of commenting on criminal proceedings. But on the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday night the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, referred to live cases during a lame attempt to justify the Government’s despicable plan to introduce 42-day detention without charge. He said, before an audience of millions: ‘Three cases have gone not for 14 days, but for 27 or 28 days, and those three cases are now being pursued through the courts for the most serious terrorist offences.’ The word ‘alleged’ is missing. Can this be right?

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Mr/Ms W. Smith

1. You accused me of being in favour of EU because I said something that obviously (for you) only a pro EU person would say.

My argument and point is: It is not NECESSARILY so.

I can use any arguments and views I want WITHOUT being for or against something. Where is the 'ignoratio elenchi' in that?

2. You accuse me of being a Panglossian because I seem to see something beautiful that you see as 'ugly' (or .. similar).

My argument is, no matter if it is ugly, if I see it as 'beautiful' it simply IS beautiful, because you cannot force my feeling and thinking, and in the end, I may be 'deluded' in your eyes, but I am a 'happy deluded' while you may be a 'realist' but you're a bitter, miserable realist.

The point is, there is NO objective reality without a subject looking at this reality, the subject makes the 'reality'.

If I am stuck in traffic, the reality is 'I am stuck in traffic' it's neither a 'happy event' nor an 'unhappy' one!

What I do and feel and think about that reality IS the actual REALITY.

If I get angry, I AM angry, if I put the music on and relax, I AM relaxed, and I am the one who decides what reality I want, an 'angry' or a 'relaxed' one, and then that IS reality...how I, myself think and feel, and NOT how you think I should feel and think.

Is this 'ignoratio elenchi' to you?

If you use the same logic in your thinking as the one used to imply that I am Slavic, I rest my case, lady/gentleman, because I am NOT Slavic.

About writing a love poem, I'm afraid I cannot oblige, first, my English is not good enough for that, second, love is sacred to me and not something that a mind like yours can trample on.

Thank you so much for your reply. What a glorious blend of childish whimsy and ignoratio elenchi, delivered in that inimitable diarrhoetic style of yours. My favourite bit was

"How will you force me not to think what I want?"

To which my answer is that I honestly don't know, my dear. ...Though I daresay your comrades at the EU might have a few suggestions...

Anyway, since arguing with you is like trying to reason with a fruit machine, I shall agitate you no more, and instead bathe in your rhetoric on another thread. From what you keep saying about yourself, I imagine these scatter-gun speeches of yours delivered in a seductive Slavic sussurus. Oh I do hope so! Sweet, sweet Gabriela, how I adore your outpourings!

Mr. W. Smith, Pangloss was just a little baby compared to me. I can assure you that no one in this world can beat my naive, irrational optimism.

When you will perhaps one day realize that you, yourself, are nothing but a figment of imagination, you will maybe understand that if I want to see it pink, it IS pink, no matter how much you try to prove to me that it is black.

So you almost got that part right.

As for being a 'socialist' - I don't know, I may be, but that depends very much on what YOU understand by the term 'socialist' - if you tell me that, I will let you know if I am a 'socialist' or not.

"I'm not anti EU, I'm not pro EU (although I still think a United Europe could be a wonderful thing, I love to see people united and not divided, also, what happened now in Ireland is actually EU democracy - not only Irish - in action - but nobody seems to want to see this aspect...)"

Well, if that's what you call "not pro EU", then I can only wonder at what "pro EU" might be...

...And dont you just love that last bit --- "what happened now in Ireland is actually EU democracy - not only Irish - in action". Talk about inversion! My dear, do you know why "nobody seems to want to see this aspect"? It's because "this aspect" is a figment of your fluffy pink utopian imagination. The very term "EU democracy" is an oxymoron.

...And if "unity" means the British are going to be shoehorned into bed with a continent full of Panglossian socialists like you, then you can stuff unity.

I agree with you that Jonathan Ross is a loud, foul mouthed lout and certainly not worth the money he is being paid. I did not see the programme when David Cameron was interviewed but this is something politicians have to put up with if they agree to be on TV show, it is he fault of the BBC that they employ such lewd people and I for one would not spare the time to watch him and many others of his kind
Joan, Pontefract

As we are only going to be left with two rights as a nation: to raise taxes and declare war, let us invoke the latter, declare war on Brussels to to thwart their obviously hosile intentions.
Many Thanks to the voters in Ireland. They have nudged the ball now lets get behind and push it!

I'm not anti EU, I'm not pro EU (although I still think a United Europe could be a wonderful thing, I love to see people united and not divided, also, what happened now in Ireland is actually EU democracy - not only Irish - in action - but nobody seems to want to see this aspect...) but I just HAVE to say:

WELL DONE IRISH PEOPLE !

if it's only because of this:

"Even the Pope could not turn the tide: he used a Vatican speech to urge Catholics in the country to vote for the treaty, but was ignored by the devout Irish."

I just wonder if the Pope read all 300 something pages of the treaty and understood them, before urging people to vote for it?

Edith Crowther writes:"We can't address it whilst it draws strength and life (if you can call it life) from the EU."

Well said! Absolutely right. Before we can even start to rebuild our culture, we must pull the EU plug. Even then we'll have problems, I'm sure. for no rulers give up control of an erstwhile captive population without a murmur but at least then they'll be directly accountable to us once in a while, without being able to hide behind directives imposed from abroad.
The only reason I can see for even thinking twice about withdrawing would be, if we were threatened with invasion, should we decide to secede from the Union.

To Edith Crowther:
Thank you for your informative reply. Tarquinius, ancient king of Rome - ancient even to the Romans of Cicero's and Julius Caesar's time - is said to have been driven from his kingdom by the Roman people in (I think) 510 BC or thereabouts after many acts of overweening arrogance, which earned him the nickname "Superbus" (arrogant).
He is perhaps most known by admirers of Shakespeare as the rapist of the lady Lucretia, wife of Collatinus.
I don't know whether they tried him or not before expelling him. Probably not for fear that the Crown Prosecution Service might not wear it and so perhaps they just decided to say it with swords instead.
At all events he went into exile from which he never returned.

'Just a mirror idea .... for ... why maybe it COULD work. I'm not saying it will, but maybe that it 'could' ?'

Because the architects of the EU always had a very clear idea in mind of what it is they wanted, and it isn't that. Switzerland is a very conservative place compared to the EU and membership of the EU would certainly not allow that to continue. It retains it's independent status because it is convenient to the Global system - it is the World's bank.

It would be nice if all nations attained to the condition of Switzerland, but again, with the EU, 'all nations' is certainly not what they want.

Gabriela, you say under the EU there is so much more freedom than under communism. Perhaps it's just much better at convincing you you're free. If we all end up in an unelected EU dictatorship, who will overthrow the regime? We haven't got much oil.

I meant to add that I do sympathise with Grant and his list of horrors imposed on us by Westminster not Brussels - and not long ago I too harboured flights of fancy where the EU would save us from Westminster. But in reality, it is the other way about. Westminster is a secondary tumour feeding off the primary cancer of the EU and daily drawing destructive power from it. If you spend hours ploughing through legislation, directives, etc., (which I have not done), I think you will find that almost everything that emanates from Westminster these days is done under an EU umbrella. So even if we get rid of the EU, we will still have a problem - but we can then address it. We can't address it whilst it draws strength and life (if you can call it life) from the EU.

Hallo Peter Preston - yes, sorry, I was just parroting the author of a recent history of political trials which starts at Charles I and ends with Saddam Hussein. He says he started with Charles because he was the first. I guess he has no proof other than an absence of other recorded instances - I am most intrigued by Tarquinius Superbus and would like to know more, especially about where the Superbus came from, but it sounds as if he might have escaped a full trial like a certain superb Prime Minister of Britannia. The thing is, I was struck by the author's reminder of how fully and legally Charles I was tried. And it really was terribly British - though perhaps we got it from Roman Law, but after all continental law is more Roman than ours, so I don't think it was the Romans who gave us that unique love - and I mean love - amongst both the common people and nobles for just law, and the ability to distinguish it from unjust law.

In "The Identity Of England", Robert Colls opens Chapter One (entitled "The Law Becomes You") by describing how a marriage between law and freedom (a marriage made in heaven) was the bedrock of our country, from lawmaker Aethelbert in the 7th century and then onwards, reaching high points under Alfred (871-99) and Cnut (1016-35). Law guaranteed liberty by giving it an order and pattern to be obeyed by all (except the king); it also enabled fair and moderate taxation by the king which in turn enabled common and moderate prosperity and an ordered but not regimented society, but by Glanvill in 1189 and and Bracton in 1220 it was made clear that the law did not belong to the king. It belonged, in theory at least, to the English people.

Law has acquired a bad name these days, so has taxation, but they are being misused like religion, that is all. Equity has virtually disappeared, a very bad sign indeed. Trusts do not mean Trusts at all any longer, merely a tax avoidance device - arguably necessary these days to avoid unjust taxation, but it still demeans the basic meaning of a Trust. And so on. But the bedrock is still there, silent, solid, simply waiting to be rediscovered in an hour of need. It is because the unions NEED real law that they are using it, just as the people of England really really needed to get rid of the monarchy for a bit or leave for America (as many did from 1607 onwards, and later on a lot of northern Europe did as well). It is now not the monarchy at all which we really really need to get rid of, but the EU. Running away is not a sensible option, anyway there is nowhere left to run to these days that does not have similar problems of its own, especially if it too is in the EU.

The trouble - for Britain, at least - with the EU ideology is that it is based on the facile assumption that "bigger is better". This may indeed be true for multinational trading companies and ambitious and opportunist politicians, both of whom may accurately see in it opportunities for aggrandisement. However, I am enough of a democrat to think that societies ought not to be convulsed - as British society is currently being convulsed - in order to further the ambitions or income of politicians or greedy traders.
The ordinary folk of a country need continent-wide centralisation like they need a hole in the head.
It has, after all, to be purely doctrinaire thinking behind the notion that everyone living in an entire continent must have their lives controlled by the same laws (or "directives" as they prefer to be thought).
If the ordinary peoples of Europe were to simply ask "Why?", what would the commissars reply?
Are there not in any case positive advantages in having different laws - and more importantly different penalties for infringements of those laws - in different areas, as there are, for example in the United States?
If not only Europe but even the UK itself was permitted to adopt such a system, after a few years it ought to be possible to draw revealing and profitable conclusions about the efficacy of those laws and penalties by the simple process of statistical comparison.
Since the 1975 Common Market referendum our politicians have been allowed brazenly to move and even reconstruct the political goalposts and, piling one meaningless abstraction upon another, finally to mesmerise us into believing that we have actually opted for our present helpless plight.
Bruised by two hideously destructive world wars it was not surprising that European leaders should wish by uniting Europeans in some way to avoid any repetition of the tragedy but the trouble with leaving power lying around, as the rather starry-eyed inventors did, is that it will pretty soon by seized by someone with rather different ideas.
The most charitable thing that one can say about the EU in my opinion is that, if we are careful, it may not actually lead to war.

"I don't even know why we are arguing about this - all the Pro-EU people - just be honest and tell us WHY you want us all to live in a centralised social dictatorship that will effectively dispense with national sovereignty - but don't pretend that this is not so."

Guy Reid-Brown

"Switzerland is a multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-confessional nation held together by the desire of its people to be united. It has been a federal State since 1848 – one of 23 in the world and the second oldest after the United States of America.

Switzerland consists of 26 cantons. These are the original States which joined together in 1848 to form the Confederation to which they ceded part of their sovereignty. Each canton has its own constitution, parliament, government and courts".

>>>

Just a mirror idea .... for ... why maybe it COULD work. I'm not saying it will, but maybe that it 'could' ?

Is not the entire aim of democracy to ensure that individuals and the communities in which they live have the greatest possible say in how they are governed? If so, then surely the associated decision-making should be as highly devolved and decentralised as possible?

The European Union model is precisely the *opposite* of this --- massive centralisation of power. Note that in EU Newspeak (nEUspeak?), "devolution" means effectively its opposite: in reality the "devolved" regional assemblies (like that hideous talking-shop which drives us Welsh up the wall) don't produce local accountability --- instead they soft-sell EU policy.

Some left-wing contributors here have pointed out the failings of the British government. Yet have not grasped the fact that failure is what governments do *best* --- and the bigger the government, the bigger (and more costly) the failures. Why, then, is it to be desired to have everything centrally planned and regulated by one gargantuan pan-European state? Don't they know how this ends? And how it has ended, every time it has been tried?

"But if you're saying that trial by jury is right, then everything else must be wrong. Poor European countries, they must all be sending innocent people to jail".

No, Gabriela, are you unable to grasp basic concepts? The point of the unique English system of jury trial, is not that all European countries, with judges, "send innocent people to jail". Rather it is that the right to jury trial, prevents the state being able to decide who goes to jail.

Did you not get that?

The judge is an employee of the state.
So, in communist countries, when the judges work for the Government, then the the governing Party, can influence the judge to send political opponents,and dissidents, to jail.

But the British system, guarantees that cannot happen, by ensuring someone can only be convicted by 12 impartial members of the public, not employees of the state!!

That's the point of the British system, and what makes it a unique guarantee of liberty from the state.

It is also the only system that puts the law in the hands of the people, not the Government. That is what is the major difference between Britain and the rest of Europe, Gabriela.

Here, liberty,and law, is the property of the people, not the state.
So the English Bill Of Rights, does not give limited rights to the people, it gives limited rights to the state.

Gabriel Manueal Scherer, the answer is simple. The British system never failed, that is why it was copied by the Founding Fathers of the US Constitution!!

If you mean it "failed", because EU laws superseded British laws, this is simply because, since 1972, our politicians, have pretended the EU was a purely economic project, and have lied about its political dimension.

You say
"Because it did. If another power - EU - has actually penetrated this British system, being able to take you over, then the most free governing system in the world, must have a weakness somewhere, if it failed you.

I would be very interested to have your views on WHY it failed"

No. Gabriela, another power did not "penetrate" the British system. On the contrary, our politicians, actually consciously SOLD our powers away to the EU.

They did so quite deliberately,and consciously, because they do not want the massive responsibility that comes with having to be in charge of our country, our laws, and our Government. They want to give it away to someone else.

The system did not "fail" Gabriela, the Government simply agreed, in secret, to give away many of the powers of our Parliament, that belong to our people. All liberty, is hard-won, but easily given away.

My point to you, was that you could not see the "big difference" between us and Europe.

The British justice system, and system of government, is unique in the whole of Europe, from jury trial, to habeas corpus, from our system of "all is permitted unless specifically prohibited", to our independent institutions, Britain has shaped all liberty-loving nations.

Thus, all the freest nations in the world, from the United States, to Ireland, based their Constitution, and legal system, on the British one. Because it is the only system that guarantees liberty.

"Does this mean that this perfect British system CANNOT work unless it is based on people telling the truth?"

No, Gabriela, it means the British system can only work if it is actually allowed to remain in place.

But it is being dismantled by our elected Parliament, and our politicians, who are giving our powers away to a European Court, which does not observe the same principles of justice, and the same relationship with the state, and the same liberties, as the British system.

The British system does not "fail", but works brilliantly, which is precisely why our corrupt politicians, would desperately like to change it, in order to give themselves more power over us(as, for example, the new 42-day detention law, would ruin the ancient English "presumption of innocence", a crucial guarantee of liberty from the state).

European nations have never been as free as us, from the state, which is why it is so dangerous, that we are now surrendering our ancient liberty, to a European superstate.

Contributor Grant writes:"We must band together to protect European civilisation in what will be difficult years ahead."

You should be a politician, sir. After all, you already have the style of language. But to come down, as they say, to brass tacks, how do we go about "banding together" precisely? And with whom exactly? and do you mean invite them - whoever they may be - into our homes? And from whom or what should we protect European civilisation?
And how do you know the years ahead will be difficult?
Might not neighbouring countries be rather like neighbouring families? Awfully nice folk and so forth but thank Heaven they've got their own homes to live in, like us.
If I had to "band together" with my neighbours too often, though they are very nice people indeed, I think the notion of "civilisation" might take a knock or two.

Edith Crowther writes:"King Charles I was the first monarch in the whole history of humankind to be put on trial for crimes against his people."

How about Tarquinius Superbus, then? And who can say even he was the first? It's possible, I suppose, that Tarquinius may not have actually been tried before being expelled but when you use expressions like "in the whole history of mankind" I wonder how you - indeed how anyone - can possibly know such a thing.
Best wishes

'I can hear screaming in my mind 'but we were lied to' that's why it failed.

Does this mean that this perfect British system CANNOT work unless it is based on people telling the truth?

The EU Project was planned to be where it is now from the beginning - from the forties/fifties, people just do not know the history, they have never heard of Jean Monnet and so forth - it is a dictatorship alright, and it was known all along that it had to be imposed step by step and with deception all the way. This is why I keep on pointing up the lies. The lying was always an essential tactic - after World War 2 the European peoples were not going to accept the same totalitarian ambition if it was declared outright.

I don't even know why we are arguing about this - all the Pro-EU people - just be honest and tell us WHY you want us all to live in a centralised social dictatorship that will effectively dispense with national sovereignty - but don't pretend that this is not so.

Whereas I personally have found Jonathan Ross to be highly amusing at times in the past - on both television and radio - I now await Friday nights with bated breath in light of the staggering salary I too have contributed to on pain of imprisonment.

£18 million must surely guarantee the entire country will be racked with such hysterical laughter convulsions that we can finally forget – albeit for an hour’s grace – that we have wasted another seven days of our lives here in the Sick Man of Europe.

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